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We live in loud, chaotic, busy times. There are so much that is new, every day, that competes for our attention. Take the whisky world, for example. Every week there is a new release, a limited edition, and one-off or a collectible — the new releases are so regular that you could be forgiven for getting a little blasé about it all.
Maker’s Mark has never operated like that. Since Bill and Margie Samuels established the Maker’s Mark distillery in the 1950s, they have only ever released whisky using one mashbill. The mashbill for Maker’s Mark is the same for Maker’s Mark 46 (the difference being a little extra ageing and a higher proof), as it is for smaller releases you might find elsewhere around the world.
That is, until the inaugural release of their new wheated whisky, Star Hill Farm Whisky.
Star Hill Farm Whisky is not a bourbon, but a wheated whisky, made using wheat sourced from farmers all within 100 kilometres of the distillery in Kentucky.
And with this release, they’re highlighting some of methods that they believe make good whisky — and chimes with what Rob Samuels says is their 100 year vision. (That’s a pretty long horizon to have in mind for any endeavour, but it might just be what our busy, short-termist world needs right now.)
Regenerative farming practices are a big part of that vision, both on their own estate and for the farmers they work with. These practices are crucial not just for better environmental and human health outcomes, says Samuels, but for making more delicious whisky.
Below, we take a brief look at how the Star Hill Farm Whisky is made, before talking to Rob Samuels on his recent trip to Australia, about the whisky, and why taking care of the land on which their ingredients are grown results in better whisky in your glass.
How is Star Hill Farm Whisky made?
Two mash bills are combined to make Star Hill Farm whisky: one that uses a mix of 70 percent soft red winter wheat — the kind which is used for Maker’s Mark — and 30 percent malted barley; and one that is 100 percent malted wheat. They use a roller mill, and it undergoes a 3 day fermentation period before being distilled to 65 percent ABV; it is then put into barrels at 55 percent ABV.
That whisky was then aged for seven or eight years. The spirit for Star Hill Farm whisky went into barrels on August 30 2016, August 4 2017, and August 11 2017.
It is then bottled for release at cask strength, which for this inaugural release is 57.4 percent ABV.
BOOTHBY: What was it like hanging out on chef Matt Moran’s farm? He’s something of a local hero.
ROB SAMUELS: Gosh, deservedly so. Just such a dynamic personality.
He’s about as Australian as you get as well.
Very Australian. I love his spirit of hospitality. The way he talked about hospitality really resonates with me. You know, my grandparents didn’t like traditional advertising. They wanted to build the brand in a personal way, one to one. And my grandmother designed the distillery before distilleries ever formally hosted groups, before they had visitor programs. Engineers designed distilleries. She said let’s design their distillery to be personal. And she’s credited with inventing bourbon tourism. So I loved his passion for hospitality and obviously we are all in on regenerative agriculture, for know all the environmental benefits, human health benefits — and then ultimately it leads to more flavour.
You spoke a lot about topsoil — why is that important and what comes out in the glass?
It’s life in the soil that provides everything that drives flavour in the ingredients. You have to have top soil for agriculture. Over the last 60 years or so, conventional farming all over the world is destroying the top soil. There’s no biodiversity. It’s reliant upon chemical inputs.
And we’re degrading the soil with conventional farming. We’re polluting the waterways, the water table. And there’s no biodiversity. It’s denuded soil. It’s just dead soil where it’s like the earth is just holding up the crops, so you can put chemicals in from above.
And regenerative agriculture builds life back into the soil. With conventional farming, the only stakeholder that actually prospers are the chemical companies.
But what’s really nice with regenerative farming, you build back life in the soil, you build back the topsoil, you’re regenerating and you’re not polluting.
What we see is that within two years or three years, growers are able to significantly reduce all their chemical inputs by as much as 50 percent.
And that helps their bottom line.
All that goes straight to the bottom line. This has been a learning — we thought we were doing well years ago. We buy all of our grain from the same farmers. All of these farmers are in the same community, most of our competitors don’t even know where their grain comes from. So we thought we were doing well.
What was it that made you start thinking about this in more depth?
Just taking it out of the distillery, to be honest. You know, talking to some of the chefs like Matt, if you ask the great chefs, a lot of them spend more time on starting with the best ingredients.
We’re a wheated bourbon and wheat fundamentally changed about 60 years ago. This scientist, Norman Borlaug, won a Nobel Prize because he’s credited with saving a billion lives with a breed of rye he created, which you could ship it all over the world and it was shelf stable, feed the starving populations in India and everywhere else.
But he took the flavour out. So we’re working with leading wheat breeders. We have tinkered around with heirloom varieties, but we’re a believer in modern varietals that are at the height of flavour, that have a competitive yield, and then we want to role model regenerative farming practices.
In the last 12 years, all of Star Hill Farm was totally transformed. We’ve integrated rotational grazing; you move the livestock through the pastures, it builds life back in the soil.
There’s been a big boom in interest in bourbon — do you think think consumers, especially in the premium whisky space, want to know where their bourbon comes from? You spoke a bit about transparency.
Yes, with estate whisky certification, any distillery in the world, Australian distilleries, whisky distilleries in Scotland, Japan, anywhere in the world — if you meet the criteria of growing your grain within 30 miles of the distillery, and if you are influencing the farming practices.
So you’ve got the relationship there with the farmer.
It can be on your land, can be on somebody else’s, but within 30 miles. And are you controlling the farming practices? And then are you producing all of the whisky, aging all the whisky and bottling it? You can become an estate whisky.
How many distilleries do you think are doing that at the moment?
Star Hill Farm was the first, and I think there are six distilleries in America so far, but there will be more. You know, there’s 2,000 distilleries in America now, 90 in Kentucky, but you walk down the aisle of a package store and some brands are transparent, many brands are not.
So we want to be transparent. You see it with tequila with all the additives. There’s no additives in bourbon. It’s all natural. But most brands in whisky aren’t all that transparent about their sourcing.
What makes Star Hill Farm different to Maker’s Mark?
Maker’s Mark, as you know, is a wheated bourbon. And even though Star Hill Farm is a new style of whisky for Maker’s Mark, it’s a wheat whisky. It’s still very much pulled from the foundations of my grandparents. And even though they’re no longer with us, their vision influences everything. From the culture to the community to our consistency and how we innovate. You know, we know all of our growers. We’re very loyal to them. And if we were to ever create a new style of whisky, what would we create? It’s not what could we do, it’s really what should we do?
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, right?
Yeah, there’s all kinds of stuff we could go do tomorrow morning if it was all about short term and sales. But what should we do? We’re following my grandparents’ vision, they are the north star.
A big part of our goal with Star Hill Farm whisky is getting to a proprietary wheat varietal that’s at the height of flavour with our top tier regenerative farming practices that we begin to include into Maker’s Mark.
So the idea of terroir is important?
Terroir matters, location matters, soil health matters, varietals matter. But life in the soil, we believe, is more impactful on flavour than the seeds you put in the ground. And we want to push flavour through wheat. And if we’re going to do that, why not create a wheat whisky? Why not use Star Hill Farm and role model the highest order of regenerative farming, share what we learn with the whole world.
Why is that important to you? Because you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to have your regenerative efforts certified for example.
Verification is important because are we who we think we are? We also want to have a roadmap on how we get better, how do we integrate the crop rotation? How do we get better, better, better? Maker’s Mark got certified in fall of 2023, and since then all the fresh distillates rolling through our stills today, all of it is certified regenerative grown agriculture. We want to be active in the community. We have a higher purpose. We are B Corp certified.
The only B Corp certification in Kentucky I believe.
The only B Corp certification of any of the distilleries in Kentucky, the only bourbon distillery I know of in America. But when we got certified in the fall of 2023, once it was announced, so many other companies and brands wanted to learn more. If we can do it, so can you.
But this is a more expensive process, there’s more work involved. Why is that extra expense and extra effort important for you to undertake?
When you’re in the whisky business, you have to think long term. And we have a hundred year vision—
A 100 year vision? I don’t know what I’m doing next week.
And it leads to better ingredients. Everything’s about flavour. If you come to Maker’s Mark, everybody you meet — everybody — it’s all about flavour. And we came into regenerative agriculture because of flavour. By the way, there are all these environmental benefits — healthy soil is better for the environment, for sequestering carbon. But we came into it through flavour.
You spoke eloquently about your family history, and being the eighth generation in of distillers. Do you feel the weight of history sometimes?
It’s interesting you ask that. I actually went and worked for a competitor for 10 years, for a different company in the industry outside Kentucky. And it was a rewarding experience because it proved to me that I love the industry beyond just having an affection for a family legacy. All of my family members, all of my cousins, they all have an affection for the legacy. But do you want to make it your life’s work? That is a very different question.
And I proved to myself, I was totally fulfilled working for that other company. I never wanted my father to feel like he had to hire his son. So I wanted to be invited back. And that came in January 2006. I left that other company, came to work at Maker’s Mark. I grew up in the distillery, worked all the jobs in the distillery growing up. I did it all.
And it was just a great honour. For me, this is the first craft distillery in America. Our competitors, three or four years ago in Food & Wine Magazine said Maker’s Mark is the most important bourbon brand that’s ever been made, because prior to Maker’s Mark, premium bourbon didn’t exist. And what the magazine said was, the co-founders of Maker’s Mark chose to reimagine what bourbon could be in a moment in time when it didn’t look like bourbon had a future. Bourbon was taking a nosedive.
The founders — your grandparents — took a big risk to do that as well, right?
They were young people. They could have put their feet up, never worked a day in their life. They sold the T.W. Samuel’s distillery for enough money as young people in their late 30s. They would have never had to work a day. And they risked it all to do something that nobody even knew was possible. Can you create a bourbon without the bite? Can you create a bourbon that’s softer, richer, full-flavoured, balanced? Would there ever be a market? Would consumers ever be interested?
And to my knowledge, Maker’s Mark’s the only bourbon brand created after Prohibition that did not borrow whisky to get started.
To build a distillery, start, operate month after month, year after year, overhead expenses, no revenue? And we’ve been a single source of supply since the beginning, which is very rare.
So we’ve never sourced, we’ve never sold whisky to another distillery. And then my dad expanded in a purposely inefficient way. If you’re a craft distillery and you finally have growth, you can expand, make more and bring your costs down. And we didn’t do that.
We built a mirror image. He built a second distillery identical to the original. Same size of everything.
There’s magic in that setup, right?
There’s absolute magic in that. And then 10 years ago we built our third. So under one roof, at our still house, we have identical triplets: same roller mill, same batch size, same slow cooker, same fermenter, everything’s the same column still, same doubler.
Do you ever wake up in the morning and feel like you have got to do something different? Is there a tension between honouring tradition and doing something brand new?
It’s not easy to have an iconic classic brand. But we stay true to our founders vision. But it’s really liberating to have that commitment to the founders vision. Because I mean, you tasted Star Hill Farm whisky today. That’s something new. That’s something that we created. It didn’t used to exist, but it is very much built on the foundations of the past.
You can taste the lineage in there too.
You can feel it, you can see it, even though there’s no red wax and Maker’s Mark. This was born out of our founders vision.
That 100 year vision is a remarkable thing to get one’s head around.
You have to have an infinite mindset. If you want to be in business 100 years from now, you don’t cut corners on quality, you treat your team members really well, you have great relationships in your community. If you said, is your goal to be out of the business in five years, I would behave very differently. But we want to be in business, thriving, connecting in bars and restaurants in Sydney 100 years from now.
To learn more about Maker’s Mark and the wider Suntory Global Spirits premium portfolio — sign up to join Club Suntory at club.suntory.com.
